Friday, November 30, 2007

Lillian Necakov lives in Toronto where she has been writing and publishing for the past 30 years. She is the author of Sickbed of Dogs, Wolsak and Wynn 1989, Polaroids, Coach House Press 1997, Hat Trick, Exile Editions 1998 and The Bone Broker, Mansfield Press 2007. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in the U.S.A., Europe, China and Canada, including Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence,Mercury Press, 2004.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It absolutely didn’t. It just allowed me to move on to the next batch of writing, although it was kind of cool to see my name on an actual book.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

My family moved to Toronto from Belgrade, former Yugoslavia when I was 3 years old. Geography does impact my writing, but it’s my immediate geography, meaning my neighbourhood and the neighbourhood I work in. You tend to write about what’s around you, what you know. I work in an at risk neighbourhood in a pretty tough part of town where I see a lot of poverty and violence but I also get to see the good stuff that goes on there. All this is bound to affect what I write about. If you read The Bone Brokerit’s all there.

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

The work always starts with a tiny speck of an idea, a word or an image that is swimming around in my head. I never just sit down to write. There has to be something brewing before I can actually hit the keyboard. I usually write piece by piece or section by section, I tend not to think in terms of an entire book or body of work. I often have an entire poem or part of a poem composed in my head before I ever write it down. This process can take minutes or days.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I think they are part of my creative process. They can be positive or negative experiences but they almost always give me some kind of encouragement to go home and do more or better.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Most of the time I don’t really know what the hell I am on about until later, when I go back and look at what I have written and how it may connect to what I have written before or what I am trying to accomplish. Really I think I write because it is the only way I know of connecting the dots of my existence, our collective existence. I suppose that is a kind of question I am concerned with.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

If it is a good editor it is essential. You can never step outside of yourself enough to be able to look at your work with that eagle eye.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Easier, mostly because I am not self-publishing anymore!

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Today, I love pears. My dad has a pear tree in his garden; I grew up with them falling all around me.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I don’t really know, I try not to take any advice.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I don’t really move between genres much. I have written some fiction and it takes me a hell of a long time to write. I am a real perfectionist, every word and phrase has to be dead on, sound just right etc… not an easy transition for me.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Typical day for me begins at 6 am, get the kids ready and off to school, then get myself ready for the long trek to work (bike in the warmer weather and transit during the winter). I work full time running a community branch library, so I have no real routine when it comes to my writing. I write when I can grab an hour or two, mostly late at night or on Mondays which is my day off. I think that is why I tend to compose a lot of my work “on the run” so to speak and then commit it to memory so that I can later write it down. Needless to say, my memory is pretty good, or at least I think it is?

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Usually to a good book. I read a ton of fiction as well as non-fiction. I don’t read much poetry.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I think my latest book is a lot more thought out in the sense that it works as a whole. The work is stronger and there are some real departures (more humor and longer pieces). I suppose I am getting better at it, writing I mean, at least I hope I am. I feel like the work is a bit more mature.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Sure! Films, music, nature, riding my bike all that stuff, how can it not? If you look at my stuff I think you will agree that it is pretty visual with all the imagery and so on. That is direct result of my love of film and visual art.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Thursday, November 29, 2007

The 2008 Robert Kroetsch Award

The competition for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry is on now. Please note that entriesfrom last year or revisions of last year's entries may be resubmitted for consideration. This year's judge is Elizabeth Bachinsky. The winner receives a trade paperback contract with Snare Books which will include the publication of the manuscript and a $500 honorarium. Deadline: January 31, 2008.

Last year's winner was Thumbscrews by Natalie Zina Walschots, beating out over 60 other manuscripts. Each entry must be accompanied with a business size SASE and an entry fee for $30.00 Canadian. This is a not-for profit contest and all revenues are directly applied to the production and dissemination of the work. Please make all cheques and money orders payable to "Livres Snare". No cash please.

Book lovers across the country are invited to read this novel and participate in scheduled events. The Canada Reads debates will air daily on CBC’s Radio One from February 25 to 29, 2008, each episode ending with the elimination of a title.

Join the nation and cheer for Icefields as it battles against four other books chosen by celebrity panelists. Visit the NeWest Press website for related news and event listings: http://www.newestpress.com/.

Written by acclaimed author and Edmonton resident Thomas Wharton, this remarkable book has been published in 6 countries, won numerous awards, and developed a following of rapt and loyal readers. Icefields has been cited by the Times Literary Supplement for its “crystalline beauty.” People magazine calls it “a finely etched tale of love in a cold climate.”

It seems to me that any form you choose both lets you say certain things and at the same time limits the contents of what you can talk about, and therefore to reach the other, which you could say is the reader in one way, but I also meant it in the very basic sense that other people are strangers to us, all other people, so to reach out is to find as many exits and entrances as possible, which I saw it as being a question of formal choice: the more fluid you become moving between forms … unless you are contained by the issue of form per se. But the issue is not to get rid of form, but rather to multiply the sense of possibility, and that’s the way I’ve been, I think, rather clearly, operating.

Perhaps Nichol wasn’t talking about publishing per se, but there are certainly considerations that could be applied to such. In a similar vein, the editors of the new collection work to explain their own framework, as they begin their postscript, “This book is a frame.”:

You can see bpNichol’s work through it, but our frame, like many frames, has glass in it – glass that colours and textures, reduces and magnifies, reflects, refracts and, yes, occasionally distorts. Any book that pretends to do otherwise can be trusted even less than usual.

The Alphabet Game is indeed ‘a’ reader. Given bpNichol’s extraordinary literary output, what we present here is by necessity only a fraction of what he wrote in his lifetime; there have been, and we hope there will be, other collections of his work, in both print and digital form. This is only the beginning, again.

Rife with in-jokes and other Nichol references, the two-page postscript ends with:

In the meantime, we have established a website, bpnichol.ca [unfortunately not actually scheduled for launch until spring], which will continue the project that The Alphabet Game has begun, acting as an open-ended online anthology. The site will house a range of digitized Nichol material, including sound files of Nichol’s recordings, full-colour images and scans of his musical scores. Our goal is simple: to ensure that as much of Nichol’s work as possible stays available in as many forms as possible. To paraphrase Nichol, there are infinite alphabets ahead.

I’ve travelled the country because of my writing. I would have travelled a little if I’d never become a writer, but not nearly as much as I have. I would never have gone to Winnipeg (in November!) if it weren’t for their writers festival, nor would I have gone to Taiwan if it weren’t for the tour I did there.

2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I like the idea that Kamau Brathwaite puts forth in his book History of the Voice, that conventions of meter come from specific geographies; that the pentameter is European and does not fit in the Caribbean; that Caribbean poets should develop meters that derive from the hurricane and the tides. Because I am from Vancouver, looking out the window at a rainy and cloudy day gives me a feeling of comfort and normalcy. Things like that probably creep into one’s aesthetics.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Sometimes it’s as part of book, sometimes it’s just one poem. Poems start with sounds, for me.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

The audio poetry that I do, live on turntables and mostly with Jason de Couto, is a creative process. Reading conventionally used to be a bigger part of the process for me than it is now. I think because the turntable-poetry is where I’ve focused all my thinking about performance, I’ve found that the rest of my writing, the stuff that isn’t written for that ongoing project, feels less meant for live reading.

5 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve never worked with an editor for a book-length work.

6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

It’s a stalemate between harder and easier. Some of my skills are better, but my understanding of what I don’t know is also greater.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Anne and I went to Harrison a few weeks ago and we bought some organic pears there.8 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My friend David Gutteridge gave me some really good advice at a particular point in my writing life. This is not to say that Dave always gives good advice; he sometimes gives really bad advice and then later can’t remember that he did it. For example, he once persuaded me to throw away all my old high school yearbooks. I can’t remember what his argument was, but it was eloquent and convincing, so shortly after this conversation I threw them in the dumpster behind my apartment. Then, a few years after, when we were at his mother’s house, he got out his own high school yearbooks from her closet, and I said, “Hey, you told me to bin all my yearbooks! Why do you still have yours?” And he had completely forgotten that he had convinced me to trash mine, and neither one of us could recall what his point had been back then. So sometimes Dave’s advice is crap. Nevertheless, at a certain point when I was in my early twenties and wanted to be a writer, but was floundering, Dave told me to do more living, to get out and do a lot of interesting things, and then write about those things. It wasn’t that I did interesting things because of this advice, but rather the advice helped me think of myself and my locality as a subject in a new way. It was the right thing to hear at that moment, and it sort of shifted my perspective away from the young writer’s trap of derivativeness.

9 - How easy has it been for you to move between your own work to collaborative pieces? What do you see as the appeal?

Working with Jason de Couto is exhilarating. We plug in all sorts of gizmos: analogue and digital turntables, effects pedals, samplers, et cetera. I love it. We often talk about bringing someone else into the performances to play with visuals the way we play with sound. Collaboration is great. I’d love to build our sound-poetry performances into something even more elaborate.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Whenever I have a spare afternoon, I write at the Vancouver Public Library. I find the commute to a location outside my home frees me up to concentrate on my writing rather than answering emails, the phone, work, and so forth. I have a need to write in complete silence, yet I like to be around people, so the library is the perfect setting. It’s weird, but I like to see people, and know they are they, but I want them to be totally quiet so I can hear my lines as I write them.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music. It’s always changing. Today I was marveling at the production on “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” by Michael Jackson. Those insanely grandiose orchestral arrangements of horns and strings all whirling around, and you can see all the musicians in the studio and how much work it took to get those takes, and then it all just gives way after the introduction to a little percussive two note doodle on the guitar. Two notes, but the guitarist wrings complexity out of it with that funk rhythm. There’s a good example of form. Jackson is supposed to have written that, and I guess he came up with the vocal melody, but it’s Quincy Jones’ production that makes it matter. That contrast of scale. A wall of horns and strings and all that breathing and violence, down to a small two note sketch that took no more than lifting and lowering a finger a few millimetres to make it happen.

I press myself into her belly. Her breath into my white shirt. Her cool breath against my sweating forehead so I can feel the bubbles evaporate. I lift her arms and leave them empty above us and bend and pull the brown dress up to her stomach and then up into her arms. Step back and watch her against the corner of my room her hands above her holding the brown dress she has lifted over her head in a ball. Turns her back to me and leans her face now against the dress she brings down to her face. Cool brown back. Till I attack her into the wall my cock cushioned my hands at the front of the thigh pulling her at me we are hardly breathing her crazy flesh twisted into corners me slipping out from the move and our hands meet as we put it in quick christ quickly back in again. In. Breathing towards the final liquid of the body, the liquid snap, till we slow and slow and freeze in this corner. As if this is the last entrance of air into the room that was a vacuum that is now empty of the other histories. (p 61)

He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour. (p 14)

Saturday, November 24, 2007

new from Chaudiere Books: Old Winter by Anne Le Dressay

The pieces that make up Anne Le Dressay’s second poetry collection, Old Winter, are urban poems grounded in the rural past. Understated, direct, ironic, quietly humorous, they reveal a love of the particular, of small daily things which feel more and more fragile in a world overshadowed by big threats. Descriptive or narrative, focussing on the inner world of mind and spirit or the ‘real world’ outside the narrator, these poems celebrate in close and vivid detail the small moments of ordinary life. They are poems of wonder, transformation, and resurrection.

Those who inherit this earthare those who shout loudest, or whosimply take because they knowit's theirs.

If the meek inherit,it's not anything as spacious or solidor fecund as the earth.

Unless they taste itin the dust kicked upby the exuberant wheels of the trueinheritors taking off with theirinheritance.

Anne Le Dressay grew up in Manitoba, first on a farm near Virden and then on an acreage outside Lorette. She has lived for extended periods in Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Edmonton (in that order). She taught English and Creative Writing for ten years in Alberta. She is now in Ottawa for the seond time, working for the feds. She has been published sporadically since the 1970s. She has one previous trade book, Sleep is a Country(Harbinger, 1997) and two chapbooks, This Body That I Live In (Turnstone, 1979) and Woman Dreams (above/ground, 1998). She was also featured in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets(Chaudiere Books, 2006).

Friday, November 23, 2007

Edmonton readings; the past few days

Friday November 16, fait acomplit reading/launch

I don’t know too much about this thing, a regular magazine produced by students in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Alberta; the readings were of poetry and fiction by younger folk, which was pretty interesting (I was there for Trisia Eddy, who had also just launched her first poetry chapbook through her brand-new chapbook publishing company). Not a bad little magazine, but I don’t understand any magazine that tries to charge the people they publish; apparently the journal was $10 for regular folk, and $7 for contributors. Damn tacky, if you asked me; I would rather have paid a $5 cover to go to a reading, just so the contributors would get a couple copies for free. Is that so much to ask? There must be a way for some of the buckets of money that seem to be free-flowing around campus and around the province to get into their hands and coffers, to allow for such a thing.

When people dogging my face I takepills for taking stuff and some shit.

Because they think I’m fucked upis leaving you – for good nobody.

That I’m bipolar and I don’t want bewit man scratch that never mind.

Since I’m through caring about fuckand that’s wait for you for ever.

Both authors gave extremely funny and engaging readings to (unfortunately) a small crowd. I’m intrigued by William Neil Scott (read this rather dim review of his book here), and was impressed by his use of dialogue in Wonderful, a novel (NeWest Press), edited by Edmonton writer and NeWest Press board member Thomas Wharton. Unless you really know what it is you’re doing, dialogue can very easily come off as false, but Scott doesn’t seem to make a single wrong move.

“This is amazing,” he confided.“It is,” she agreed. “It truly is. I should have done this from the beginning.”“Would you like to dance? It’s not right that you’re off by your own here.”She looked up at him. “I’m a little bit old for dancing.”“Nonsense,” he said, extending his arm.Laughing, Ester Anson reached up and took my father’s arm.For the rest of the evening, the people of Garfax laughed and danced, drank and told stories. When the morning blue came, they extinguished the fires, turned off the lights, and moved through the silent pines back to their cars. One of them men from the moving company had been left to drive Ester to Benning. They found him asleep in the front seat.“I want you to have my house,” Ester told Cadmus in the blue.“That’s extremely generous,” my father said, a little drunk.“I’m serious. I’m leaving it behind me, Cadmus. The rest of it is yours.”“Are you sure?”“I’ve decided.”Cadmus opened the door for her and woke up the driver. Before getting in, she stood on her tiptoes and pulled him down to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.“You’re absolutely welcome.” (p 60)

In reading we use our eyes and imagination. With radio we used our ears and imagination. With television we use our eyes and ears. Some of us watch television with our mouths hanging open. Television reaches us. It covers us with light. Any poetry that tries to appear on television sounds all wrong. When producers bring poetry onto the set they try to make it act like television. In poetry there is no laugh track and no suspenseful string music. Imagination doesn’t have a chance; there is no imagination in that light. A man holds a handgun. A popular consultant ridicules a book-buying husband. At first they told us that microwave ovens were for cooking meals. At first there were people who thought that television would be for the arts. Once a long time ago, you would see an author as the last guest on a late night talk show. These days we see the young walking around with wires hanging from their ears. How long will it be until the inventors sell them wires to hang from their eyes? My blind buddy rides the buses, his fingers reading a large book, the young all around him, staring into nowhere, wires hanging from their ears. He uses the fingers of his right hand and his imagination, farther away and more in place than they’ll ever be. (Horizontal Surfaces, Olive)

I REMEMBER that my parents drank coffee all day long, and until recently, so did I. So did my late wife and I. So does my sister, a year younger than I; she has a pot on all day. But she still smokes cigarettes. About the time I stopped smoking cigarettes, I cut my coffee down to about three cups a day. Uncle Gerry and Auntie Pam downed it all day and night. I have always known that coffee is a family habit, but my daughter didn’t get it. What I really liked was getting old enough to have coffee with my parents, and smoke cigarettes with them. My father always put one drop of milk into his coffee. He hated milk.

Saskatchewan is shaped like a big empty page. The blank page, the Chinese say, contains the infinite. There are infinite ways for snow to fall; there are infinite ways for the poem to be written.

It’s been a generation since the publication of the last anthology of new Saskatchewan poets. Almost overnight, it seems, another group of poets has surfaced in the community and grabbed the attention of the literary journals. It is time to showcase them, to gather their voices and celebrate a changing consciousness. Six hundred pages of submissions later, Fast Forwardis the result.

While a few of these poems are about place, an anthology of Saskatchewan poets is not necessarily about being here. Poetry is by definition innovation; each of these poets has turned a unique form of experience into art. These poets are looking up from the prairies toward possibility and a broad view with subjects as diverse asancestry, love, birth, death, history, nature, and growing old.

Saskatchewan has always had an interesting arts history that has seemed separate somewhat from the rest of the country; recently I watched a documentary on the Emma Lake workshops, highlighting a history of inventive visual art in Saskatchewan that has continued for decades. For some reason, the Emma Lake Artists’ Workshops (founded by Kenneth Lochhead and Arthur McKay) managed to work with some of the most inventive artists of the 1940s through to the 1960s at their peak, producing out of their workshops painters such as Roy Kiyooka and the “Regina 5” (Kiyooka, who should have been included in such, but is an argument for another piece altogether). What becomes interesting, though, is how the avant-garde of the visual arts can engage with Saskatchewan on a ground level, but somehow the writing community doesn’t seem terribly interested or aware of what is and has been happening with writing in the same way; how can one explain the discrepancy? Still, one of the poets included in this collection is Daniel Scott Tysdal, originally from Moose Jaw but currently schooling in Toronto, who has been described almost as Saskatchewan’s “great (white) hope” through his first collection Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Regina SK: Coteau Books, 2006), working through a number of extremely interesting formal applications as well as with using voice, and multiple voices (despite the fact that the work included in this anthology I wouldn’t call his best). Another “new” poet that has been much discussed over the past little bit has been Sheri Benning, currently of Saskatchewan but formerly of Edmonton, where she did doctoral work at the University of Alberta, now author of two trade poetry collections from Brick Books, including the recent Thin Moon Psalm(2007). But still, the benefit of much of this anthology is that there are a number of poets inside that have been living on the periphery, just waiting and working their way into a larger and wider attention.

A Letter to Jorie Graham

An answer isn’t expectation,isn’t knitted from the yarn

of any poet’s words. Isn’t everythingsomething? There’s usually a why

and an oh, each of these sometimesspidery, sometimes eight different paths

that channel my brain, gesture with parted legs.Each one a foot or two plotted institutionally

like a house on the low prairie field,an erection of wood and glass, something

birds stare at, flap into, circlelike an interruption of interest.

(I’m building something like it.)Not imitation, or repetition,

just easy movement,a hawk, crow, or even the robin

at five, then four, then threeevery morning. The word’s turn

synchronized, seasoningits way through months until

even the days begin to hidesomewhere underneath, laugh

at the green north side, frozenfeatures wasting away. A façade

realizes its own alter ego, leansa mole nose against the backside

like an address, one placeto the other, my forehead

to paper, horizontal sense of blue stretchedskin and veins and ink. (Tracy Hamon)

Part of what makes this anthology compelling is not just the poems and the poets themselves, but the fact that a number of them have short prose pieces in the back, small essays talking about their process, whether generally, peripherally or about a specific piece. As Benning writes in her “’Stare, Stare, Stare’: Learning How to Read Wolverine Creek”:

Lawrence Buell writes that according to contemporary literary theory a writers’ capacity to render a faithful mimesis of the natural world is considered to be relatively unimportant and her interest in doing so is often thought to be a secondary concern (p. 84). Literary depictions of nature are all too often thought, by critics, to exist for their symbolic or ideological attributes rather than as objects of contemplation for their own sake. Buell adds that “all major strains of literary theory have marginalized literature’s referential dimension by privileging structure, textuality, ideology or some other conceptual matrix that defines the space discourse occupies as apart from factical ‘reality’” (p. 86). Thus literary theory has turned the attempt to generate writing which articulates and foregrounds the environment into a puerile, untheoretical pursuit.

The editors mention that it’s been a generation since the last anthology of new Saskatchewan poets; I almost wish that they would have mentioned what that might have been? Part of what makes regionalism so frustrating is that from where I live, I would probably never know unless I go out of my way to ask; I know Edmonton’s NeWest Press published two volumes of the anthology Ride Off Any Horizon(1983; 1987), but they were more “prairie” than any specific province; I know of a number of “prairie” anthologies and even some for Manitoba. What other were the Saskatchewan ones?

Are my feet on the ground yet? Now I can finally talk about the first issue of PARSERthat arrived two months or so ago, after even further months of anticipation. Any journal or publication of any kind anywhere that manages to get writing out of Vancouver poet (and Ottawa Valley-raised) Dorothy Trujillo Lusk deserves a medal of some kind (I’ve been trying to get poetry out of her for years, for issues of ottawater…), and I’ve just been staggered by the poetry of Rita Wong lately (she apparently has a new book out any minute now with Nightwood Editions). Aside from that, seeing the first issue of any journal is certainly a cause for celebration, and I applaud the ambitious aspects of what the editors are attempting with this publication, putting some of their Vancouver that doesn’t often make it into Canadian literary journals in a finally available forum.

p a r e n t (h) e t (h) i c a l b r e a t h

from & for rk

if these cells ever absorb the warmth of an Indian autumn:perambulatory witness to neo-colonial streets in saltwater city,Aboriginal Columbia, this year of increasing immune systemdisintegration

a pulmonary commons called planet

a breath that met another in the commotion of nouns, gerunds,subordinate clauses cluttering the historical air: whoo-oosh!ping!

There is a whole aspect of “difficult” work that Canadiana doesn’t really seem to want to have to deal with, whether the work of the Kootenay School of Writing (check out their online pdf journal W) or other forms that fall outside of mainstream standards (or ideas of “hipness”), an idea that I’ve always found rather frustrating. When Queen Street Quarterlyfinally ended their run, there was suddenly a whole range of Canadian writers and writing no longer available in journal form anywhere in the country. Why do you think that is?

To be honest, there were several other things in my life that I’d anticipated for many years before they actually happened that were more rewarding. But yeah, it feels great to see your first book roll off the press and (in the case of dyslexicon) to trim and bind it yourself. Mostly what it showed me was that there’s more to the writing game than getting a book out—there’s waiting for the reviews, doing the promotion and tours, and dealing psychologically with the collective indifference that poetry is met with in our culture.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

About 15 years now, broken by a return residency in Kingston from 1999-2000.

I’ve written a book (ironically) titled Torontology, contributed to the uTOpia series, and have always found the city a huge inspiration.

Uh, yeah… but rob, this is crazy, why do you ask about race and gender within a question on geography?

3 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A poem usually begins with a title and a general idea of the form. Titles, for sure… I’ve still got a huge list of titles for poems that I’ve named, but haven’t written. I usually write in sequences, and usually with ten parts. Once two or three sequences have been composed I start thinking of them as being part of a book project, and consequently start shaping subsequent pieces with that in mind.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Definitely part. Almost all of my poems get their trial run at public readings, and I listen closely for audience reaction to help determine whether to keep or kill a piece or sequence.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Absolutely.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to be read closely by an intelligent editor and, with all of my books, I’ve been lucky enough to work with several. That being said, I do find it silly to fight about “house style” issues, or debate about whether “a typical reader” (whoever that may be) will “get” a reference or need more explication of form/ process.

7 - After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Mid-career kinda sucks. No longer the new kid, and decades away from grey power. The writing may be better, and you may have more confidence, but it gets harder to generate excitement among whatever readership you may have with each new publication unless you’re doing something radically different. Hence my attempt to shift towards a poetics of engagement, as well as narrative prose, in the last while.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Easily my most hated fruit. Great if you want a pack of sugar with a mouthful of sand. I think I accidentally ate a piece of one about seven years ago when some chichi restaurant decided it would go well hidden in a grilled cheese sandwich.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily givento you directly)?

Read more than you write. Write more than you publish.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical essays)? What do you see as the appeal?

Moving from criticism to poetry and back happens quite often—they really do feed into each other. Fiction, on the other hand, is a huge challenge, and I continually find I am deeply skeptical of narrative.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I reserve the hours after 11 p.m. for writing. I usually carry a notebook throughout the day to jot down lines and ideas which gets pulled out at night.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

In vino veritas.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? Howdoes it feel different?

My last two books were collaborations. So it feels nice to relinquish some hubris. Sharing the launch of a book with someone else is surprisingly fun—some pressure is taken away, and there’s someone you can commiserate with immediately.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had younot been a writer?

I don’t have the steadiest of hands, hate giving other people orders, dislike narrative, and almost never watch movies, yet, despite all that, I think I would have been a decent film director in a different life.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I think I often do something else than write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

As I mentioned above, I almost never watch films. The last one I saw was about six months ago: Winterbottom’s adaptation of Tristram Shandy. I thought it was a noble enterprise and a pleasure to watch, although I don’t know if it qualifies as “great.”

20 - What are you currently working on?

A second draft of my novel. A new collection of poetry that I’m calling Post. A pataphysical anthology of early Canadian avant-garde poetry entitled Mortar, and a series of Situationist-style children’s poems called I Can Say Interpellation.

One of Canada’s essential cultural workers, it is almost as though the collapse of his involvement with the first Coach House seriously began to curtail his literary activities, and just at the point when he was about to embark in the most interesting work of his career so far, including publications such as Honeymoon Suite(Toronto ON: Underwhich Editions, 1990), The day they stole the Coach House Press (Toronto ON: Eternal Network, 1994), Icon Tact (Toronto ON: The Eternal Network, 1996), LETTER DROP(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1999), Eulogistics (published as STANZAS #20; Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999), Moon Over Viagra (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2002) and MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2005), and even an earlier version of the collection that appeared as ICON TACT [POEMS 1985-94] by InstaBook in 2002.

The order of the day was ‘cut your origins,’or ‘remove the dead wood of the past,’a lasting legacy that wouldn’t go awayeven when part of it died. Complicit,the elixir of greed had crept under the skinof the interlopers, some of whomhad come on board to make careers.

O’Hara is dying in the dunesGuitar the axe of apesTropes assigned their millenniaBillions of dollars in debtFlorid pillars of regretBig boogies behind the weatherFollowing the head that cried melodyOr calling the siblings dirty namesCarving a mythology of sonic boomersIncluding both waffle and vacuumInto whom won’t two go?There’s a seam in seamlessand it’s always crookedFrom walking that way to the bankOf the River of No Return

Written in couplets, with much the same feeling as the poems in Eulogistics, I am disappointed that the poems that make up LETTER DROP (originally published with a series of drawings by painter David Bolduc) and MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 didn’t make it into this collection, and wonder at the reasons why; is it simply a matter of space, attention or something further? With the poems in this collection, it’s obvious that Coleman is interested in the twist and the pun, working language in that “serious play” that bpNichol so often talked about, but what is it about the “I/eye” that keeps coming up in Coleman’s pieces? From his 1960s poetry journal Is (or, “eyes”), to the obvious penis reference from his first book one/eye/love (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1967)? (We won’t even begin to discuss the ejaculation blurry close-up shot inside his Stranger collection from 1974, or all the penis artwork otherwise in the collection.)

It does become interesting that Coleman has an ongoing interest in structuring his collections through these notions of time, as opposed to highlighting some of the other structures he has worked over the years, telling us in the title what years the poems were worked on, from his Old Friends’ Ghosts: Poems 1963-68 (Toronto ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to From the Dark Wood (poems, 1977-83) (Toronto ON: Underwhich Editions, 1985), his LAPSED W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978-89 and even his Open Letter issue, Seventh Series, No. 4: Winter 1988-89, “Victor Coleman: a selection of art writing and literary commentary 1966-83,” edited by bpNichol. Whatever else you might think or have thought of his poetry (Coleman has the distinct honour of being the only poet removed from Gary Geddes’ infamous 15 Canadian Poetsseries), is the openness of his work, the open-ended seriality of where Coleman’s poems go that give them their strength; Coleman’s poems have never been afraid to look you directly in the eye, and managed to bore a hole through both individuals, the watcher and the watched. Not about the “I” as such, but about the singular gaze.